Award-Winning Scholar | Prof | Poet

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Recent Recognition

Finalist for the 2025 Black Warrior Review Fiction Contest, for “Courtshop among the Peoples of Eastern Cuba”
Finalist for the 2025 Alta California Chapbook Prize, hosted by Gunpowder Press, for Refugee Lotteries
Finalist for the inaugural (2024) Cardinal Poetry Prize, sponsored by Wesleyan University Press, for Lessons in Cuban Cosmology: Fifty-Two Poems & a Villanelle

Books

WINNER – 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion, awarded by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion at the 2017 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting

HONORABLE MENTION – 2019 Barbara T. Christian Literary Award, given by the Caribbean Studies Association

FINALIST – 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions, presented by Journal of Africana Religions

WINNER – 2024 (inaugural) Leonard Norman Primiano Book Prize on Vernacular Catholicism, awarded by the American Folklore Society